When the shoe pincheth

“The Church must take account of this reality, but in the sense of reinforcing its commitment to evangelization,” he said.

“I think that you cannot just talk of a defeat for Christian principles, but of a defeat for humanity.

“The family remains at the centre and we have to do everything to defend it and promote it.”

Where to begin.

This “family” bullshit is very modern; the Catholic church has certainly not put “the family” at the center throughout its history; on the contrary. “It is better to marry than to burn” is not what you’d call a hearty endorsement of family life.

And then, if the family is so very central, why is the entirety of the core church hierarchy officially anti-family? Mandatory celibacy also is not a robust endorsement of family life.

And then, equal marriage promotes families and family life, it doesn’t dent or destroy them.

In Italy, the government of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is preparing to present legislation that would allow civil unions between gay couples.

The Irish referendum has also boosted calls in Germany, which allow same-sex civil unions, to go further and legalise same-sex marriage.

Pressure has started to grow in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which opposes any change.

“One would think that what the Catholic Irish can do, we can do too,” CDU parliamentarian Jens Spahn told the German Die Welt newspaper.

Comments

You can’t sell what nobody wants to buy – Marketing 101. Though, if memory serves, the example was usually dead cats or some such.

The deep and serious solicitude for the fate of that everlasting part of our being, the concentration of all its energies on its own individual welfare, withdrew it entirely within itself. A kind of sublime selfishness excluded all subordinate considerations. The only security against the corruption which environed it on all sides seemed entire alienation from the contagion of matter; the constant mortification, the extinction, if possible, of those senses which were necessarily keeping up a dangerous and treasonable correspondence with the external universe. on the other hand, entire estrangement from the rest of mankind, included in the proscribed and infectious world appeared no less indispensable. Communion with God alone was at once the sole refuge and perfection of the abstracted spirit; prayer the sole unendangered occupation, alternating only with that coarse industry which might give employment to the refractory members, and provide that scanty sustenance required by the inalienable infirmity of corporeal existence. The fears and the hopes were equally wrought upon – the fear of defilement and consequently of eternal perdition; the hope of attaining the serene enjoyment of the divine presence in the life to come. If any thought of love to mankind as an unquestionable duty entailed by Christian brotherhood, intruded on the isolated being, thus labouring on the single object, his own spiritual perfection, it found a vent in prayer for their happiness, which excused all more active or effective benevolence.

On both principles, of course, marriage was inexorably condemned. Some expressions in the writings of St. Paul, and emulation of the Gnostic sects, combining with these general sentiments, had very early raised celibacy into the highest of Christian virtues: marriage was a necessary evil, an inevitable infirmity of the weaker brethren. With the more rational and earlier writers, Cyprian, Athanasius, and even in occasional passages in Ambrose or Augustine, it had its own high and peculiar excellence; but even with them, virginity, the absolute estrangement from all sensual indulgence, was the transcendent virtue, the pre-assumption of the angelic state, the approximation to the beatified existence. …in the fourth century the eloquent Fathers vie with each other in exalting the transcendent, holy, angelic virtue of virginity. http://tinyurl.com/82gtb4s